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Snow

Laurel Reed Books, 2004. 6 x 11.5, 24 pages. 50 copies. $10.

In the 1980s I taught myself to write Hemingway’s “One True Sentence”, by arranging my poems in an open technique I called “Scatter Poetry.” It makes it seem random, but it is not. Like the work of Frank Bidart or John Cage, the goal was to make a score for the human voice. The elasticity of the technique led to my books A Delicate Fire and Dancing With My Daughter, and from there directly to my prose book Out of the Interior. When Robin Skelton edited my selected unpublished poems, A Delicate Fire, in 1989, he put most of these manuscripts in a metal trunk, which rusted and mouldered in his basement for a decade, before they made their way back to me. Excited by the possibilities which I had prematurely abandoned, I put my hand to it again with a series of poems I wrote during the 1990s. Snow is the first fruit of this play.